Friday, January 26, 2007

Pom victory

The Australians love to call Brits “whingeing Poms”, but no more. A group of Brits in Australia have succeeded in their long campaign to ban an ad that depicted Englishmen as whingers.

The Australian version of the ASA, the Advertising Standards Bureau, yesterday ruled that the Englishmen were right to be offended by an ad for beer that negatively stereotyped and demeaned English people.

The radio ad for Toohey’s New Supercold beer (let’s face it they advertise nothing else in Australia other than beer) featured a group of Englishmen singing Land of Hope and Glory with various synonyms for whinge, including whine, moan, slag and complain.

The ad ended with a voiceover saying: "Introducing Toohey’s New Supercold, served so cold it’s a Pom’s worst nightmare".

The bureau ruled that negative words in the ad detracted from what it said was the otherwise playful nature of the word Pom. It said that Pom had been given "a derogatory and almost hostile meaning", Mark Jeanes, the acting chief of the bureau, said. The ad has been withdrawn.

The Aussies are obsessed by us in a way we're not about them. The ASB considered five TV, print and outdoor ads that made reference to the Australia-England rivalry in the advertising material.

While complaints were held against the Toohey's ad, others were not. Some examples of other ad taglines used last year included "sends shivers down a Pom's spine"; "the Poms are going to choke"; "Aussie cricket fans can stick it to the Poms"; and "for backyard fun, tonk a Pom". It's a strange place.

In deliberating on the complaints, the ASB considered that the use of the word "Pom" is part of the Australian vernacular and largely used in playful and often affectionate terms.

The board also said that Pom is not used in a way to vilify, or incite racial hostility towards, people of British extraction, particularly when considered in the context of the cricketing tradition and affectionate rivalry between the two countries.